Researchers have studied communication between schizophrenics and their parents, but little systematic analysis of nonverbal (paralinguistic) cues in such interactions has been done. Most of the research on schizophrenic family communication is concerned with aspects of the verbal content of that communication. Although there has been some attention to nonverbal issues, it has mostly focused on non-linguistic speech characteristics such as interruptions, hesitations, and fragmentary speech. The proposed research is an examination of the nonverbal communication of affect via voice tone in families of schizophrenic children and in normal control families. In addition, affective discrepancies between the nonverbal vocal channel and the verbal (transcript) channel will be examined in both kinds of families. The study is a secondary analysis of data collected by E.G. Mishler and N.E. Waxler. The raw data are audiotapes of discussions held by families of a schizophrenic child and by control families. Thirty-nine of the familes participated in two discussions, once among parents and the index child (schizophrenic or control), and once among parents and another child of their own (well sibling). These audiotapes were transcribed by Mishler and Waxler, and the transcripts were analyzed for patterns of verbal communication. Our study involves (1) systematic sampling from the transcripts and the audiotapes and (2) obtaining judges' ratings of transcript samples and of electronically content-filtered speech samples on a series of rating dimensions of affect and orientation. Affective discrepancy scores will be computed by taking the absolute difference between judges' ratings of verbal (transcript) samples and content-filtered speech samples on each rating dimension.